Case law

Case law is a special subset of court rulings which create precedent and give definitions about how patent law is to be interpreted in the given country. The most important cases define what is and isn't patentable subject matter (i.e. is software patentable or not).

(If you're looking for court cases which were important for other reasons, see List of lawsuits.)

There are many criteria on which a court can rule a patent to be invalid. A court might say the patent wasn't original enough, or wasn't sufficiently innovative. Those court rulings are not very interesting for our goal of excluding software from patentability.